One morning in May, residents of the small French city of Orléans woke up to stickers slapped onto light poles, park benches, and other street furniture. “Muslim-restricted area,” the stickers read — accompanied with crossed-out photos of headscarf-wearing women, bearded men, and figures praying. Below another text read, “A better world without Muslim [sic].”
The stickers, left-wing daily L’Humanité reports, included the URL of a recently jailed Normandy-based neo-Nazi. He was infamous for his T-shirts proclaiming, among other crass and racist things, “Refugees welcome” in the form of the entry gate to Auschwitz.
The stickering action was no isolated incident. Nor was it the most extreme. In the first three months of this year, seventy-nine Islamophobic hate crimes took place across France — an increase of more than 70 percent relative to the same period in 2024, according to the interior minister.
If this shift has accelerated in recent months — made all the more poignant by the fatal April 25 stabbing of Malian man Aboubakar Cissé in a mosque in Southern France — the country’s Islamophobia epidemic has much deeper roots. Such is the bad atmosphere for Muslims, it’s even leading to brain drain. That’s the main finding of a recently edited and rereleased book by three French researchers, La France, tu l’aimes mais tu la quittes (France, You Love It but You Leave It).
For three years, Olivier Esteves, Alice Picard, and Julien Talpin investigated the increasing numbers of highly qualified, well-educated French Muslims who have decided to leave the country for greener pastures — usually in more multicultural countries like Britain and Canada. The researchers interviewed more than a thousand French Muslims living abroad — nearly all of whom were born and raised in France and had French nationality — to identify the push and pull factors leading members of France’s largest religious minority…
Auteur: Phineas Rueckert
